Poetry and Literature
Poetry and Literature
Monday Sep 04, 2017
Podcast: The Labor Day Poetry Show -- 2017
Monday Sep 04, 2017
Monday Sep 04, 2017
This morning's poetry show opens with Joy Harjo and her band Poetic Justice, performing two of her stunning compositions: She had some horses, and Letter from the 20th Century.
Naomi Shihab Nye's very short story Thud -- the moment when the person to person connection wipes out islolation -- teases us with the change to come.
Elizabeth Alexander's Praise poem on the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, and Marge Piercy's To Be Of Use officially open the Labor Day celebration. Alicia Ostriker, Philip Levine, Lucille Clifton, and Langston Hughes chart the courses of Labor's freedom. Ray Bradbury's Last Night of the World begs the question: What do we do with the time we have left.
This podcast was broadcast on EnlightenRadio.org on Labor Day, Sept 4, 2017 from the Red Caboose Studio in Bolivar, West Virginia. John Case and Mike Diesel host.
Monday Aug 28, 2017
Monday Aug 28, 2017
This podcast of the poetry show was broadcast at EnlightenRadio.org studio -- the Red Caboose in Harpers Ferry, WV -- August 28, 2017. The Poetry Show is the Monday show on the Winners and Losers Radio Program.
This podcast opens with James Thurber's "The Elephant that Challenged the World" -- no explication should be needed. This follows selections from Ilan Stavas' wonderful collection and translations of Pablo Neruda's Odes --All the Odes. Having climbed the Andes of Poetry, why not take on the Alps as well? We follow with the first of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies. A sample of readings from Lucile Clifton and E. Ethelbert Miller close the show, along with Rilke's The Death of Moses.
Music is mostly from an later acoustic bootleg of Jackson Brown and David Lindley in Belgium.
Monday Aug 14, 2017
Monday Aug 14, 2017
Jeanne Wagner is a native of San Francisco, California. She has B.A. from the University of California Berkeley in German and an M.A. from San Francisco State in Humanities. A retired tax accountant, she began writing seriously in 1996. Since then she has published four chapbooks and two full length collections and has won several national awards. The chapbooks are The Falling Woman (Pudding House Press, 2001), The Conjurer (Anabiosis Press, 2004), Medusa in Therapy (Poets Corner Press, 2008) and The Genesis Machine (Sow's Ear Poetry Review, 2017), winner of the 2016 Sow's Ear Chapbook Competition. Her full-length collections are The Zen Piano Mover, winner of the 2004 Stevens Manuscript Prize, and In the Body of Our Lives (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010). Among her prizes and honors are the National Foundation of State Poetry Societies Founders Award, the Ann Stanford Prize, and the Frances Locke Award. She has also won the Hayden's Ferry Flash Prose Competition and the 2013 Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred.
Her poems vary in subject from the scientific to the personal, from nature to mythology, and they reflect her curiosity about and engagement with the world on many levels. In an interview with William Ruof, she reflects on memory: "Memory is like Schrödinger’s Cat, it changes the moment you peer into the box where you think it is kept."
This week's featured poem is "The Disappearance of the Polar Bears," from her collection In the Body of Our Lives (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010).
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE POLAR BEARS
They were our saints and our hermits,
our ursine angels.
In exile they found a promised land
where cold
condensed under their feet and they
walked on it;
where they moved soundlessly as ghosts,
hearing,
even under ice, the strenuous beating
hearts of seals.
Some journeyed as far north as the Pole,
that skullcap of ice,
its whiteness the imagined afterlife of
ordinary bears,
their bodies solid as icons: squared off
limbs, shoulders that
tapered to a muzzled head, dog-small
and low-slung.
Yet who could fail to love their
black-eyed cubs,
born with the furred innocence
of harp seals,
or the way they swam, legs paddling
in circles,
tractionless as the running in our
dreams.
That's why I keep this image of
a single bear
standing on the pole, his white body
on the whiter ice,
like the pulse of something warm
inside the cold.
Could the problem be the airplanes,
when they scattered
the angels from their wisps of cirrus
cloud, while below,
on cruise ship tables, ice sculptures
slowly began to melt away?
Writing prompt of the week: Choose any compelling image from the natural world. While describing it, add in a supernatural or mythological image, the way Jeanne Wagner blends angels and polar bears in her poem.
Monday Aug 07, 2017
The Poetry Show -- Aug 7, 2017 -- Carl Dennis
Monday Aug 07, 2017
Monday Aug 07, 2017
This podcast was broadcast On Enlightenradio.org Aug 7, 2017 in Bolivar West Virginia
Carl Dennis was born in St. Louis, Missouri on September 17, 1939. Neither of his parents were literary; his father founded a chemical company and his mother had been a registered nurse, although she had a strong interest in the arts. However, Carl Dennis had an inspirational and influential high school English teacher, Augusta Gottlieb. After high school he searched for a college that would resemble "the ideal Platonic Academy," attending Oberlin College and the University of Chicago before graduating from the University of Minnesota. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley and subsequently to teach at the University of Buffalo (1966-2001), where he now holds the title of Artist-in-Residence. Dennis has published twelve volumes of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize winning Practical Gods (Penguin, 2001), a New and Selected Poems 1974-2004 (Penguin, 2004) and, most recently, Another Reason (Penguin, 2014). Additionally he has written a book of literary criticism, Poetry as Persuasion: an Essay for Writers (University of Georgia Press, 2001). He has received many honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and, in 2000, the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, awarded to a living author for outstanding achievement in poetry.
Carl Dennis is a strong proponent of poetry that is clear and comprehensible. He has said, "I believe poetry should sound like natural speech. When you hear a poem, you should feel that someone is standing behind the lines, talking to an individual, offering a script that something might want to enter." In a similar vein, on the usefulness of poetry, he said, "Poetry is useful in that it allows readers to feel that they are not alone, that others have thought and felt as they have. It can do this more powerfully than any other kind of writing, or at least more directly, because in a good poem we are made to feel that we are in the presence of a whole human being speaking to us directly, or providing a script for us to enter as we see fit."
This week's featured poem, "Not the Idle" from Practical Gods (Penguin, 2001), is a meditation on what might appear to be idleness and a reminder that things are not always as they seem.
NOT THE IDLE
It's not the idle who move us but the few
Often confused with the idle, those who define
Their project in life in terms so ample
Nothing they ever do is a digression.
Each episode contributes its own rare gift
As a chapter in Moby Dick on squid or hardtack
Is just as important to Ishmael as a fight with a whale.
The few who refuse to live for the plot's sake,
Major or minor, but for texture and tone and hue.
For them weeding a garden all afternoon
Can't be construed as a detour from the road of life.
The road narrows to a garden path that turns
And circles to show that traveling goes only so far
As a metaphor. The day rests on the grass.
And at night the books of these few,
Lined up on their desks, don't look like drinks
Lined up on a bar to help them evade their troubles.
They look like an escort of mountain guides
Come to conduct the climber to a lofty outlook
Rising serene above the fog. For them the view
Is no digression though it won't last long
And they won't remember even the vivid details.
The supper with friends back in the village
In a dining room brightened with flowers and paintings
No digression for them, though the talk leads
To no breakthrough. The topic they happen to hit on
Isn't a ferry to carry them over the interval
Between soup and salad. It's a raft drifting downstream
Where the banks widen to embrace a lake
And birds rise from the reeds in many colors.
Everyone tries to name them and fails
For an hour no one considers idle.
Monday Jul 24, 2017
The Poetry Show -- Dan Albergotti -- July 24, 2017
Monday Jul 24, 2017
Monday Jul 24, 2017
Broadcast on EnlightenRadio.org July 24, 2017
Hosted by Janet Harrison and John Case
Dan Albergotti has a B.A. (1986) and M.A. (1988) in English from Clemson University in South Carolina. He went on to receive a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of South Carolina (1995). After teaching at the university level for a few years, he returned to school once more, this time to earn a M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2002). Currently he is is a Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, where he also edits the online journal that he founded, Waccamaw. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Charon's Manifest and The Use of the World (Unicorn Press, 2013). Additionally, he has published two full length poetry collections: The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), which was chosen by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the A. Poplin Jr. Poetry Prize, and Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), which was chosen by Rodney Jones as the winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition. He has been published in Best New Poets, 2005, and in 2008, his poem "What They're Doing" was chosen for a Pushcart Prize. His other honors include a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
In an interview published in storySouth, Daniel Cross Turner asked Albergotti what he thought the future of poetry was. Dan Albergotti replied, "More poetry. A series of heartbreaking disappointments and frustrating failures. Charlatans rewarded and geniuses dying unknown, their work forever lost. Despair, tears, syllables silent in the void. And the salvation of the human race."
While his first book, The Boatloads, was written in free verse, his second collection contains many formal poems. This week's featured poem, "Is It Okay If We Don't Oscillate Tonight?" from Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), is a sonnet composed entirely of questions.
IS IT OKAY IF WE DON'T OSCILLATE TONIGHT?
Is it okay if we don't oscillate
between self-forgiveness and self-loathing?
Between the power to change things and fate?
Between simple nakedness and clothing?
Is it okay if the dull pendulum
doesn't swing from one side to the other
tonight? If there's only a steady hum
and sleep and no thoughts of the dead mother?
Could we escape self-scrutiny tonight
and find a tiny precipice of peace?
Is that allowed? Could we shut out the light
and rest our face on our wife's shoulder, please?
Could we, tonight, just listen to the weak,
droning whir of the fan and not its creak?
Writing prompt of the week: Write a poem entirely composed of questions, including the title.
Friday Jun 02, 2017
Storytelling with Fanny and Stas -- May 28, 2017
Friday Jun 02, 2017
Friday Jun 02, 2017
Broadcast from Enlighten Radio, in Shepherdstown, WV
Monday May 29, 2017
Podcast: Robert Bly and confusion on the Winners and Losers Poetry Show
Monday May 29, 2017
Monday May 29, 2017
Broadcast May 29, 2017 from Enlighten Radio in Shepherdstown WV
Monday May 08, 2017
Th Poetry Show Features Poetry of Samuel Hazo -- May 8,2017
Monday May 08, 2017
Monday May 08, 2017
Janet's notes on this podcast of the Poetry Show on Enlighten Radio, aired on May 8, 2017 in Shepherdstown, WV.
Here are Janet's Notes
The son of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants, Samuel Hazo was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on July 19, 1928. After his mother died when he was only six years old, his aunt became the primary caretaker for his brother and him. In 1949 he graduated magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and then enlisted in the Marine Corps, serving as a captain. Returning to Pittsburgh after his military service, he earned an M.A. from Duquesne University and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. An extremely prolific writer, Samuel Hazo has published in many genres: novels, plays, essays, a memoir, a film script, and more than 30 books of poetry and translations. Among is recent publications in poetry are The Song of the Horse: A Selection of Poems 1958-2008 (Autumn House Press, 2008) and They Rule the World (Syracuse University Press, 2016). He founded the International Poetry Forum in 1966. The organization brought more than 800 poets and performers to Pittsburgh, including such luminaries as Seamus Heaney and Robert Pinsky. Additionally he taught English (1955-1998) and served as an associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (1961-1966) at Duquesne University. In 1993, he was appointed poet laureate of Pennsylvania, a position he held for a decade. His poetry is both personal and political, and has been praised by poets such as Naomi Shihab Nye and Martín Espada.
Responding with approval to a remark a friend wrote to him in a letter, "Knowing is stifling; not knowing is creative," Hazo commented, "We live in a world obsessed with the ultimate value of information and the pursuit of the factual over the ambiguous, the obscure or the mysterious." He goes on to draw an important distinction between the language of communication (everything from conversation to journalism, from text messaging to expository prose) and the language of communion (poetic statements, the arts and literature). He states, "Life, however, is by nature not static. It is ultimately a mystery; it has more in common with what we cannot know than what we do know."
This week's featured poem, "Only the New Branches Bloom," is from Song of the Horse: A Selection of Poems from 1958-2008 (Autumn House Press, 2008).
ONLY THE NEW BRANCHES BLOOM
Denying what it means to doubt,
this year's forsythias unfold
and flood the air with yellow
answers.
They say it's time
I opened up, time I learned
French, time I liked less
and loved more, time
I listened to the sun, time
I made time.
Why not?
Can days of making sense
of days that make no sense
make sense?
If nothing's sure
but nothing's sure, then reading
Montesquieu must wait.
Preparing for my enemies must
wait.
And gravity the hurrier
must wait because forsythias
are happening.
They make me
turn my back on forts,
insurance policies, inoculations,
wire barbed or braided,
bodyguards and all that folderol
of fear.
They say that this
year's blossoms will outlive
the lasting death of Mars.
There are no flowers on the stars.